BOOKS
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Shine Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series From the publisher: Joseph Millar’s lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar’s sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems’ subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions—love, work, death, desire—and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music. PRAISE “The difficult grace of dailiness and the defiant resilience of the spirit have always been at the heart of Millar’s poetry. Book by book, line by carefully carved line, Millar has been writing the finest poetry about work and material presence in our world since those of his exemplar, Philip Levine. Millar’s elemental belief in those around him, an unfailing tenderness, and his fabulous jazz-inflected diction are the polishes by which the American grain of these poems is made luminous. Read this book; watch it shine.”
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Dark Harvest, New & Selected Poems Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series From the publisher: Powerful poems about men and women at the margins. Dark Harvest showcases two decades of Joseph Millar’s finest poetic work, including his beloved and award-winning poems centered on the unseen men and women at the margins of American life. Millar's poems don’t favor beauty over suffering, nor do they reach for knowledge over mystery—instead, his words carry forward their Whitmanic imperatives: to turn away from nothing, to be awash in contradictions. PRAISE "Supremely sensory, everything in a Joseph Millar poem shimmers with authenticity. His is a hard-earned sensibility without a wisp of pretense. Unsurprisingly, the new poems are again spectacularly good: calmly visionary while tethered to the rough and ready. Millar’s poems give shape to the bounty of plenty and the abundance of loss in a faulty world. One comes away knowing and, yes, feeling more of what it is to be fully awake. Dark Harvest is a book to keep at hand." —Marvin Bell "Wandering the narrow alleyways of these poems, into the bottomlands, I think of a Midrashic teaching someone told me: God made the world because he desired a dwelling place in the lowest realm. Why not here, among Millar’s vagabonds and crows, his fishermen, trash fires and salt, 'the restless claws of the ocean / turning the pebbles and rocks and sand, / tumbling the chitin and shell fragments / ceaselessly and forever...'" —Danusha Lameris, author of Bonfire Opera "Joseph Millar’s new and selected is a feast of a book; epic in span, intimate in approach. With a deep lyric sensibility, Millar elevates the lives of 'ordinary' Americans into the matter of the sublime. He weaves the quotidian and ineffable into a love real and true." —Chris Abani, author of Sanctificum and Smoking the Bible "Discovering this work is like finding an old wooden crate filled with pristine hand grenades. Each of these poems can shatter you in multiple directions simultaneously."—Peter Coyote, author, actor, and Zen Buddhist Priest
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KingdomCarnegie-Mellon Poetry Series (February, 2017) Purchase: From your local bookstore / Amazon PRAISE "There is a gentleness to these poems, even when considering failure, 'this soft body that consumes everything.' These poems are full of wonder, full of 'bells of evening,' and full of quiet, ruthless joy." — Whale Road Review |
DuetWith Dorianne Laux Jacar Press Purchase: Jacar Press / Amazon
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Blue RustCarnegie-Mellon Poetry Series (2012) Purchase from the Publisher / Find this title at a local bookstore PRAISE "This book is terrific. Whether it's the true grit of blue rust or the true reckoning of the "blue compass needle," Millar's poems show us the verities of our human journeys. This is truly a poet of the people, a voice for our time." —Barbara Ras "Millar writes about people with grease on their hands, ordinary men and women trying to make it in a hard luck world. His poems always seem to be in motion, arriving or departing, true to the rhythm of our lives. He can be as consoling as a lucky red sweater, and as irreverent as your middle finger. He's a pleasure at every turn of the page." —Peter Everwine "Joseph Millar's Blue Rust is one of the most beautiful books I've read in years. In the tender, unflinching spirit of James Wright and William Carlos Williams, Millar explores the marginal, neglected nooks and crannies of private and public life. These poems combine remarkable simplicity of means with an even more remarkable complexity of effect . . ." —Alan Shapiro
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FortuneEastern Washington University Press (2007) Purchase from the Publisher / Find this title at a local bookstore PRAISE "No intellectual wink mars the poems, no one is pilloried, nothing manufactured. The forgiveness in this voice makes us feel brave." —Barry Lopez
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OvertimeFinalist, Oregon Book Award Purchase from the Publisher / Find this title at a local bookstore PRAISE "If you want the real news of how America lives, of what it's like to be here with us . . . Millar will tell you with exactitude and delicacy in poems like none you've read before. He knows a country, an America, that's been here all along waiting for its voice. It's time we listened." —Philip Levine "Hard luck and hard living have schooled Millar's voice in verities seldom glimpsed in contemporary poetry: the bone-weary truths of tradesmen and laborers running cable through our malls, of Alaskan fishermen pulling on frozen nets...a compassionate eye and careful ear for the hard lyricism of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. A rich, wonderfully refreshing book." —John Balaban
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BestiaryRed Dragonfly Press (2010) PRAISE
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OceanTavern Books PRAISE This long, sequential poem offers a sustained, elliptical, and lyrical glimpse into one of the poet's epic obsessions. Fan's of Millar's poetry will recognize "Ocean" as a stylistic departure from his recent collections, a work that fans out into the musical, shape-shifting territories reminiscent of the mid-century Spanish-language poets. —Michael McGriff |